Nostalgia (With Special Fiction Bonus)

(Floating Entry)

The text of my short story “Fireflies” is here. It’s an old story. You can read it now, if you want, or after this entry, or not at all... I resisted the urge to clean up the prose, so there’s lots of passive sentence constructions, too many “to be” verbs, probably a preponderance of adjectives and adverbs... I write cleaner prose now, sure, but clean prose isn’t what I want to talk about today.

Tonight I’ve been writing letters to old friends, people I’m still in contact with, but in a long-distance way, not with the old intimacy. I don’t think of myself as a person who lives overmuch in the past. The past made me what I am, surely, but I’m a big fan of “thisness,” living in the moment, and I place a lot of stock in future possibilities.

But sometimes I get to thinking about the long ago, sure. Riding the Wayback Train, as me and Scott call it. Playing “Remember When,” what Ted Sturgeon once called the best game of all.

Tonight I went into my Trunk, which in this age is of course not a physical trunk but a folder on my computer. I looked at those old stories, most of them derivative dreck... and found “Fireflies.” One of my first Dearborne stories.

Dearborne was my Castle Rock, my Newford, my Oxrun Station. From the summer of 1997 to the summer of 1998, almost all my short stories were set there. Dearborne was a thinly disguised doppelganger of Boone, the Appalachian town where I went to college, with liberal dollops of Savannah and N’Orleans added to the mix. I loved that town-- sometimes I felt like I actually lived there, instead of in Boone.

Or maybe I just wished I lived there.

My first two novels, “Shannon’s God” and “Raveling,” are set in Dearborne. And so many stories! Beginning with “Fireflies,” ending with... I don’t know. Maybe a novella called “Wishing Makes It So” was the last Dearborne story (I’m not going to print that one-- it’s a terrible story. Incredibly therapeutic, quite close to my heart, but not good fiction). Not that I orchestrated some apocalypse for the town, I just wandered away from it, started writing stories in other settings, with other characters. Sometimes I miss Dearborne. I might go back, sometime, if I have something new to say, something that can only be said in that place, with those people.

In the summer of 1997, I wrote “Shannon’s God.” In the middle of that project, I went to Missouri to spend the week of the 4th of July with my family. During that week, I wrote a story every day. I can still tell you what all of them were-- “The Invisible Musicians” (still one of my favorites), “Fireflies,” “The Subtle Vampire” (which was one of the stories that won me the Truman Capote Trust Prize in college, paying for my last year in school). “In the Deep End” (which still has a certain creepiness I like, Pleistocene monstrosity in a swimming pool), “Fleas” (by far the worst of the bunch). I wrote almost 100 pages that week. Not quite a record for me in terms of pure wordage, but definitely a record in terms of stories finished. It absolutely dwarfs my output at Clarion. And those stories were quite good, for what I was doing at the time-- they all had heart, they addressed serious issues, they had nice premises, the characters mattered to me (none of them appeared in print, however, save one... and I’ll get to that). I’ve had a couple of other weeks almost like that since then, where I wrote 2 or 3 stories, all of them good. But the heat of that week, the feel of ideas bursting out of my head, stories needing to be told-- God, I wish I felt like that all the time. That’s it, the perfect drug. I think it was Marquez who once wrote that, at its best, writing is a state indistinguishable from levitation.

I floated that whole week.

I actually published “Fireflies.” It was my first fiction publication. That “sale” isn’t mentioned in my bibliography for a couple of reasons; for one, no money changed hands. The magazine paid in copies. For another, I don’t want to mention the name of the publication and give it any publicity. It doesn’t deserve it, if by some miracle the bile-spewing rag is still in business. I sent them the story because I saw a listing for them somewhere (probably in Writer’s Digest, which I read before I knew better), because they took contemporary fantasy, and because I was a stupid newbie who didn’t know anything about submitting stories. I’d never read a copy of the filthy rag, which was stupid of me. Still, I sent the story, and got a most peculiar form-letter acceptance. I was pretty thrilled. Happy college-kid.

So then I got the magazine, my contributor’s copy. Basically a sheaf of 8 ˝” x 11” paper stapled together. Didn’t even look typeset-- banged out on a manual typewriter, with handwritten corrections. The other stories were total shit. And the editorial... a venomous denunciation of Jews and Frank Sinatra, if I recall, which was shockingly offensive and quite obviously lunatic. Moreover, this paranoiac editor butchered my story-- replacing the mild profanity with twisted/cutesy euphemisms, lopping off a large part of the story’s middle, randomly rearranging the prose, inserting purple, horrid metaphors-- it was horrendous. And then, at the end, he added a postscript, an “editor’s note”-- in which he complained about all the copy-editing the story needed!

I was livid. I was ashamed-- my first publication, and I couldn’t even show it to anybody. I was also terrified I’d wind up on some UFO-cult/Neo-Nazi mailing list, but fortunately that never happened.

I learned a really valuable bunch of lessons about submitting stories from that experience. I studied the business after that, I learned, and I never made such an error again.

But what a way to learn. And of course, since the story had already been published, I couldn’t try to sell it somewhere better. Not that it’s award-quality, I have no illusions, but it could’ve seen print in some ezine or little magazine, with my intent intact, unbutchered.

So I offer it here, not because it’s representative of the work I’m doing now, not because it’s a timeless classic, but because of nostalgia. The story has a sweetness to it that’s absent from much of my later work. I like who I am now, but I also like who I used to be, and this story is a nice glimpse into that old me.

The protagonist, Robert, is basically me-- passive observer, natch, not a dynamic viewpoint character, I know. Derek is a thinly disguised version of my old housemate and dear friend D. Rachel is more a character from the aether, a woman I literally dreamed about, a figment I had long conversations with in many daydreams. It might be a good idea for me to talk to her again... she always tempered even my bleakest visions with hope, though in many ways she’s a sad figure. Once in a great while I write characters who seem to have a life of their own, who speak from some corner of my psyche that I don’t normally access. Rachel is one of those. She’s not a mishmash of women I dated, as some of my friends have suggested (and for those of you who know me and the women I’ve loved, Rachel appeared long before I even met Blah-- the resemblance is purely coincidental...).

Once again, here’s ”Fireflies”-- written on a twilit evening on my grandmother’s lawn in Missouri, while watching the lightning bugs come out.

Now, I have ambitions. I have Artistic Intentions. Those aren’t bad things... but once upon a time, I just had stories to tell, and that wasn’t a bad thing, either.